Popeye

With a giant Popeye balloon leading the way, the Times Orange County Holiday Parade will step off at 10:30 this morning along the streets of downtown Santa Ana. With the weather forecast calling for sunny skies and temperatures in the 80s, the parade will begin at Civic Center Drive and continue north on Broadway to 17th Street to Main Street and concludes at Washington Street and Main.

As the giant steel soccer ball and small wooden boat out front attest, Costa Mesa's Newport Roadhouse isn't your typical Orange County bar. In fact, in just a few months, it has quickly gained a reputation as one of the hippest bars around. Known as Popeye's to local barflies in past years and now commonly called the Roadhouse, it was christened in February when manager Gabriel Tellez took the helm.

In the early 1990s, a corporate bond broker named Bob Cudequest bought a one-sheet movie poster for a 1947 Goofy short subject in an animation gallery. That purchase began his passionate love affair with animation posters. Over the next decade, he purchased some 1,500 posters of various sizes, banners, lobby cards, photographs and press books from animated movies and shorts produced from the 1910s to the present.

Popeye the Sailor Man wouldn't hurt a fly - at least, not this one. Scientists reported earlier this week in the journal Zootaxa that they had discovered six new species of “Popeye flies” on the islands of Tahiti. The insects are distinguished by their bulging middle legs, which resemble Popeye's buff forearms (no tattoos are visible on the bugs, however). They're also one of the most diverse groups of insects in Tahiti. The yellowish flies, in the genus Campsicnemus (Latin for “bent legs”)

January 16, 1997 | BETTY ROSBOTTOM, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES; Rosbottom is a cooking school director and author of "American Favorites" (Chapters Publishing, 1996)

Lately, I have been working to create less caloric yet satisfying and interesting dishes, like this main course salad prepared with fresh spinach, thinly sliced cucumbers and Granny Smith apples, chopped green onions and thin pieces of roasted chicken breast, all tossed in a dressing made with rice wine vinegar, soy sauce and a small amount of sesame oil. The salad is mounded on plates and sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds.

Re "I yam what I yam - but is it art?," Opinion, Feb. 12 I agree with Crispin Sartwell's assessment that the "authorities at the upper end of the art world" can lead us into the "worst of all possible aesthetic worlds. " Like him, I am not a fan of Jeff Koons' art, except perhaps as an enormous joke at the expense of the all-too-precious art world. I regret, however, that Sartwell did not say outright that good art does exist and that it enlightens and elevates us personally and culturally.

Interfoods of America Inc. said Chief Executive Robert Berg and President Steve Wemple agreed to buy the shares of Interfoods they don't already own to take the franchisee of Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits restaurants private. Interfoods shareholders will receive notes valued at $1.45 a share, the Miami-based company said. Shares of Interfoods rose 10 cents, or 13%, to 90 cents in over-the-counter trading.

Celebrities are so often given free handouts -- designer clothing, courtside seats to the Lakers -- that it's hard to imagine a star being excited by the prospect of free butterfly shrimp. But “Parks and Recreation” regular Aubrey Plaza insists she was overjoyed to be consuming said fried food as the face of Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits, though she wasn't yet a star. “I remember a moment where I was eating a bunch of butterfly shrimp and getting paid a lot of money to do that" during a Popeyes commercial, the actress recalled during the Los Angeles Times' third annual Young Hollywood roundtable on Friday night.

Forrest C. (Bud) Sagendorf, 79, the "Popeye" cartoonist whose art appears daily in newspapers worldwide. Sagendorf started out as the assistant to "Popeye" creator Elzie C. Segar, who began the strip in 1929 under the title "Thimble Theater." After Segar's death in 1938, other cartoonists drew "Popeye" for two decades before Sagendorf took over in 1958 and introduced new characters, including Granny and Dufus.

His girlfriend once compared his face to a shipwreck. It was easy to see why: He was square of jaw and true of heart, with a single eye, a jutting chin and a corncob pipe jammed between toothless gums. But the spinach-fueled seafarer called Popeye the Sailor sailed off a Santa Monica cartoonist's drawing board and into world fame.